Lingbo was not looking at flowers at all. She had been intending to take a look at the wisteria grove — she had, after all, promised the Grand Princess she would make wisteria cakes for her — but she had barely glanced at two patches before a lady of the royal clan arrived with her daughter in tow to “pay respects to the Duke.” Then came the usual empty pleasantries, and the young miss’s gaze kept drifting over toward Pei Zhao, which was enough to stoke a fire in anyone’s heart.

Lingbo was not angry at them — she simply turned and walked away. Pei Zhao followed, as she knew he would. He glanced back at her, his peach-blossom eyes curving into a smile.

“Someone’s jealous…” he was simply fearless, deliberately provoking her. “Which household brews such excellent vinegar?”

Lingbo immediately shot him a glare.

“You must be tired of living!” she snapped. “If I catch those eyes of yours roving around again, I’ll poison you mute.”

Pei Zhao burst out laughing.

“Second Young Miss Ye is so fierce.” Still laughing, he came over and leaned close to her with a smile, this time genuinely explaining himself. “You’re the one who invited Master Dai today, Lingbo — and I haven’t even settled that account with you yet.”

The mention of Dai Yuquan made Lingbo feel a little guilty. “It wasn’t me who invited him — Qinglan insisted on bringing him. I thought it only proper to toast him. After all, the broken engagement — that was my fault…”

“Broken engagement?” Pei Zhao immediately seized on that.

“Fine — it wasn’t a proper engagement. Never got that far, so it doesn’t count.” Lingbo was thoroughly tired of placating him, and simply grabbed a handful of wisteria blossoms and flung them at him. “Have you no end? Go on making that face and see what happens.”

Pei Zhao laughed and dodged, then moved forward to catch her.

Lingbo dodged too, though Pei Zhao was letting her on purpose, deliberately falling just short of catching up — until she had run herself out of energy, at which point he pounced, pressing her behind a flowering tree with a grin. “Second Young Miss Ye, you’ve fallen into my hands.”

The wisteria in this grove — called wild, though it was lovelier than anything cultivated at home — looked as though thousands upon thousands of bolts of purple silk had been heaped here. Standing beneath and looking up, the flower clusters hung like bunches of grapes: pale at the top, deepening toward the bottom, from near-white through layer upon layer to deep violet, releasing their fragrance in waves and drawing bees and butterflies in swarms. Truly beautiful.

She looked at the flowers; Pei Zhao looked at her. Those peach-blossom eyes of his were maddening enough when wandering over everyone else, but when they fixed on one person with this kind of focus, it was as if the entire wisteria grove surged toward you all at once — the depth of feeling enough to overwhelm.

In moments of solitude like this, Lingbo always felt a flutter of unease, as though she herself were a wisteria cake and would, sooner or later, be eaten.

So she hurriedly changed the subject. “Alright, let’s not stay here much longer — these bees are making me anxious…”

Pei Zhao draped himself lazily over her, leaning in to smell the wisteria blossoms that had fallen in her hair.

“Then where? Everywhere else is crowded. Quite boring.”

Lingbo pushed his face away and made as if to strike him; he laughed and dodged. He was endlessly patient, and also inexhaustibly energetic — he often treated Lingbo like a beloved oversized toy, never setting her down, always trailing after her.

“Don’t worry. I’ll take you somewhere. You’ll definitely find it fun.”

Lingbo brought Pei Zhao and quietly slipped through the spring hunt encampment. At this hour of the morning, the grounds were utterly still — those who had gone hunting had set out already, and those who had remained were still sleeping off the Emperor’s all-night banquet from the previous evening, including the Emperor himself, who had not yet woken. Only the palace servants and eunuchs moved quietly back and forth, preparing for the midday banquet. Palace people were trained not to make a sound — their footsteps were silent, noiseless entirely. Seeing two distinguished guests pass by, they had long since learned to keep their eyes downcast and their minds to themselves, and would not come to disturb them.

The sun had climbed to the middle of the sky, and the morning mist had scattered. Lingbo brought Pei Zhao to the high meadow where hunting parties set out each morning. From this vantage, more than half the hunting grounds stretched out below them. Lingbo scanned the scene and found what she was looking for.

She led Pei Zhao toward it — it was the Tiger King that Cui Jingyu had caught. The anesthetic had nearly worn off, and it lay in the iron cage with a dazed expression, watched at a distance by two guards, both standing well back.

“My lord—” the guards moved to bow, but Pei Zhao waved a hand and they understood, abandoning the gesture. Seeing Lingbo approach the cage, they quickly said, “Second Young Miss Ye, please be careful — this tiger is ferocious. It looks calm enough, but the moment anyone gets close it tries to ambush them. One guard nearly got bitten — it was only because Master Yuan reacted quickly enough that he was pulled back in time.”

Lingbo stopped and examined the tiger in its cage. It did indeed appear remarkably calm, yet its coat was truly magnificent — dazzling stripes of glorious fur. Its paws were as large as a man’s head. Its eyes were a yellow-green, the pupils contracted to slits. Lingbo looked at it, and it looked back at Lingbo with equal composure, as though two people were sizing each other up.

Lingbo smiled.

“Pei Zhao,” she said. “Don’t you think this tiger is fascinating?”

Pei Zhao, however, was disinterested, and only stood beside her, ready at any moment to pull her back.

“Nothing special,” he said. He turned to the guards: “What does the palace plan to do with this tiger?”

“I hear it’s to be kept in the imperial gardens.” The guard was sharp enough to know how to please his superiors. “It really is quite a pity. I’ve been at the hunting grounds for years and never seen a tiger with this kind of intelligence — it’s almost as though it’s attained enlightenment.”

“They say it’s the Tiger King,” the other guard added. “Years ago, when the Emperor hunted tigers for sport, all the Tiger Kings in the mountains were killed off — this one alone survived. Later, when the deer in the mountains overflowed their bounds, a few tigers had to be brought in from beyond the frontier as tribute, but this one is still the mightiest of them all. The grounds patrol says it holds the highest peaks on several mountains — no other tiger dares go there…”

“None of that matters now. Once it’s shut in the imperial gardens, everything is over. Many of the beasts there starve themselves to death, and when they die, their bones are soaked in wine.”

The two guards exchanged questions and answers, eager to impress in front of the young Duke whose future was so promising. Lingbo’s attention, however, had drifted to the hunting grounds.

“Which mountains form its territory?” she asked with curiosity.

The guard stretched out his hand to point. She stepped deliberately around to the same side as the tiger and gestured toward them — and she saw the tiger’s eyes shift. No wonder people said this Tiger King had nearly attained enlightenment; it had actually understood what they were saying.

Lingbo looked at the tiger, then turned back to Pei Zhao.

“Pei Zhao,” she asked with a smile, “if this tiger ran from here back to its territory — how long do you think it would take?”

A smile spread slowly across Pei Zhao’s face. Many people admired his usual languid, smiling manner and thought him dashing and charming. They did not know that when he smiled with his whole heart, it was like this — like the full moon emerging from the sea of clouds, its light flooding the heart with a vast and clear radiance.

He had known she would remember.

The peregrine falcon he had given her — the one the imperial family had set their eyes on — could fly back to the frontier in a single night, yet in the end it had not escaped the imperial house’s pursuit, and was finally returned to the Emperor’s possession.

But she knew. She understood everything.

If he had not wished for a peregrine to be caught, how much more so for this Tiger King?

Lingbo smiled faintly, and produced her plaque for the guards to see.

“Her Highness Grand Princess Minghua commands,” she said calmly, in full fabrication: “Have a team of men move this cage carriage to the edge of the forest. Yes — the edge of that dense wood over there. I wish to observe this Tiger King, and see its expression when it faces the forest.”

When the sun was directly overhead, Pei Zhao brought Lingbo up to the watchtower of the hunting grounds.

This watchtower was the highest point in the entire grounds, with a view over the whole expanse of forest. From here they could also see, in the distance, the guards carrying out Lingbo’s instructions and moving the cage to the designated spot, then, at Lingbo’s command, returning to camp.

In the noon sunlight beating down on the iron cage, what was the tiger thinking? Was it remembering the days when it had come and gone freely through the forest — the great tree in its territory, the herds of deer, the blood-soaked days of the hunt, the great snowfalls and cold winds of winter, and those summer evenings when it had gone to drink at the lake and seen its own reflection in the water?

Did it know that all of this was lost to it now?

Pei Zhao leaned against the watchtower window, idly holding a blade of grass between his lips — or perhaps two, because when he shifted, the blade produced a whistling sound. He knew many such inconsequential yet oddly delightful tricks. Lingbo was naturally curious, but she also knew that if she asked, he would tease her with that smiling ease, letting her come close only to kiss her when she wasn’t expecting it.

“Do you think the tiger can hear your whistle?” Lingbo asked.

Pei Zhao smiled and shook his head.

“From the watchtower to that cage is two hundred paces — counting the height of the watchtower, even farther than that.” He leaned against the watchtower window with easy grace and asked her, “Do you think, Second Young Miss Ye — can this arrow of mine reach that far?”

It was as though he had shed all the layers of identity these past days — the Duke’s title that had been draped over him — and become again the idle wanderer he was at heart. The imperial-bestowed robe of python scales could not change his nature; when he smiled, his eyes still carried an entire orchard of peach blossoms.

And Lingbo could be his sweetheart — perhaps a bold and mischievous little songstress, waiting at the window each evening for him to pass, heart set on eloping with him to the ends of the earth.

“I know you can hit it.” She watched him earnestly.

Pei Zhao smiled at once, and raised the Painting-Weevil bow. The lacquered black body of sandalwood had a solid weight to it; years of handling had worn it silky smooth, almost oily to the touch, cool against the cheek. The bowstring was made from the sinew of a great deer that his grandfather had once taken down at Shooting-Weevil Mountain, boiled in hot oil and treated with raw sulfur and borax so it would never decay…

This was the bow his grandfather had made with his own hands. It had once been enshrined in the Pavilion of Painted Smoke, fulfilling the allusion of the sandalwood bow in the Book of Rites — and in the end, its maker had died because of the Emperor’s son and grandson.

Pei Zhao did not look so much like him. His peach-blossom eyes and handsomely romantic bearing did not resemble Huo Anguo, nor did he much resemble the Grand Princess — so he was Pei Zhao, not only Huo Yingzhen. Lingbo had always known him only by this name, because she loved him, just as she was the one he held in his heart.

Now Pei Zhao drew the bow to a full moon, and smiled at her. “Give me a kiss, Lingbo, and I’ll certainly hit it.”

At any other time, a wanderer like Pei Zhao would have earned a strike for this.

But not today.

Today Lingbo wanted to make him happy — just as he had, every single time, made her happy. Because of the relentless grinding the Emperor had subjected him to these past days of the spring hunt. Because he was caged in the capital’s gilded world of wealth and ambition, exactly like the great tiger in the iron cage, unable to return to his own mountains.

Because he had come back willingly, for her sake.

So she rose on her toes, and lightly touched her lips to his cheek — a gesture that, by the rules governing noble ladies, had no place even between a betrothed couple. But she dared, because she was Ye Lingbo. Her fate, she would write herself; the rules of the world, she might follow or she might not — it all came down to whether she wished it.

For a moment, even Pei Zhao’s eyes widened in surprise.

But he quickly smiled.

He released the bowstring. The Huo family’s archery used the Tang dynasty method, known as the thumb draw, capable of pulling a bow at six stone. This bow, made by his grandfather’s own hands, rang like a divine whip as the fletched arrow screamed from the string, tearing through the air with a sound that epic tales call the voice of clouds cleaved and stones cracked.

Two hundred paces. He loosed a single arrow that struck the iron lock on the cage, the fine steel arrowhead carrying irresistible force, shattering the lock in an instant. Shards of iron burst outward, drawing a line of blood across the great tiger’s face inside the cage.

The tiger was still for a moment.

Then it slammed itself hard against the iron cage wall. Already damaged, the lock was knocked loose by the impact — another slam, and the iron door was thrown open. It leaped out, shaking its coat in a full-body ripple, the body that had been curled in the cage now stretching itself to its full length, the magnificent stripes of its fur shining almost luminously in the sunlight.

The wind came from the north, moving through its coat. The tiger stood calmly at the forest’s edge, looking out at the spring hunt encampment.

Pei Zhao looked back at it with equal calm, bow still drawn to a full moon. The distance from the dense forest to the encampment was two hundred paces — if three more tigers came charging, they would likely not survive the strength of his bow.

The tiger seemed to understand Pei Zhao’s gaze. It let out a roar. The books say a tiger’s roar shakes the mountains and the forests, and so it was — a true roar of authority, meeting the wind just as it rose, bowing down every tree in the grove as though the mountains were paying homage to their king.

The tiger leaped, and plunged into the dense forest.

Those brilliant stripes flashed and rose several times among the trees, then vanished entirely. But Lingbo knew it had gone home to its territory.

“Run,” she said softly. “Never be caught again.”

This Tiger King had come as close to wisdom as any creature could — surely it would learn from what had happened. For whatever remained of its days, no man who entered this forest would easily catch sight of it again.

She was still watching where the tiger had gone when a pair of arms wrapped around her from behind. Pei Zhao leaned his head down beside hers, smiling, and asked: “Lingbo has cost me a tiger. How will she make it up to me?”

Lingbo turned to look at him with a smile. “How would you like to be compensated?”

In the noon sunlight, his eyes curved gently as he looked at Lingbo — as though all the world placed in his hands would not be worth trading for her.

He said: “I want Lingbo to stay with me for a lifetime. Long and long, without one day less.”